Late Response to the Landis Ruling

I know that the decision in the Floyd Landis doping case was handed down at the end of last week (14 months after he tested positive at the Tour de France), but I figure posting my reaction four days later is just sort of par for the course the way things have gone. Was I surprised? No. Do I believe he doped? Yes, although I don't want to believe it. His team did a pretty good job of discrediting the lab that handled the samples and the way this whole thing was carried out bordered on the ridiculous, but when the arbitration panel roundly criticized the lab and still found him guilty it became pretty hard for me to believe that Floyd was totally clean.

That may be more of a response to the general state of pro cycling which has done a lot to clean up, but has so much farther to go, which makes it hard to believe that anyone that has a positive A and B sample in a doping investigation has any credibility no matter how hard they protest their innocence. I've had several favorite riders over the last few years test positive and say they were clean. It's becoming harder to believe any of them.

So where does that leave the 2006 Tour de France? With Oscar Pereiro as the official winner, a winner who is one of the least deserving Tour champs in the history of the event. Had he not been given a half hour gift as a part of a breakaway in the middle of the race he wouldn't have finished in the top 10. His lackluster showing this year is more on par with his quality as a Tour contender. No offense to Pereiro as he is an excellent pro cyclist, but he didn't deserve the '06 Tour win and will never finish near the podium again.

As to the historical significance, it has widely been reported that Landis is the first Tour champ to have his title stripped. This is not entirely true. At the beginning of the summer, 1996 champ Bjarne Riis confessed to doping during the '96 Tour and was voluntarily stripped of his title. I had also read on cyclingnews.com at some point in the last year about one of the early Tours where the champ was stripped of the race win due to cheating, although I'm going to have to hunt for awhile to find the article. I'll try to do some follow up if I find time.

Regardless, American cycling is at a crossroads with the general sporting public cynical about the sport, the biggest and most successful team disbanding and now a fallen Tour champ. There's still a lot to love about the sport, but it's going to take something special to put cycling back on a positive track in the US.

Weariness and new beginnings

The last month has been all about changing gears and trying to settle into a new rhythm at home, at church, at work, at school and with health. Weariness has run rampant as I've tried to adapt and recover from surgery a couple of weeks ago. Finding a groove that isn't accompanied by fatigue has proven difficult and the increase in commitments at church and new commitments at work have only fueled weariness. I did have a good day yesterday where I felt I was better able to pace my efforts and stay engaged in what I was doing, but today I feel tired and lethargic and haven't even really begun to dig into the things that I need to take care of for this weekend.

On a more positive note, I'm excited about restarting ministry stuff this fall. I've been looking forward to the end of summer (from a ministry standpoint) since it will give us a chance to revamp, restart and reinvest in a way that you just can't do in the summer due to scheduling and consistency issues that always seem to come up from June through August.

I'm taking part in Mercy's Alpha course this fall which is an introductory level look at Christianity and a foundational part of Mercy's discipleship efforts. We had our first meeting last night and I'm looking forward to spending the next few months with this group. After this session of Alpha is over, I'm planning on starting a small group exploring issues of art and faith. Hopefully, there will be much more on that topic to come.

I also got an email earlier from a worship team member about a desire to do more spiritual and musical development as a team, complete with some possible ideas to implement. Bobbi has been talking with Nich and Corey about this topic and all three seem to be desiring to see this happen. I've been sort of waiting for something like this to happen for awhile now but wanted to see a desire for it from within the team before pushing it. It will be interesting to see what shape this takes and how it is embraced once we begin down that road.

Back to the Fray

I'm recovering pretty well from last week's trip to the hospital. I spent most of last week on the couch or asleep and have still been feeling a bit sluggish the last few days. I go see the doc for a follow up in the morning and will hopefully receive a clean bill of health.

Saturday we hit LifeLight for a bit. LifeLight is a huge Christian music festival in Sioux Falls that reportedly had over 300,000 in attendance over the weekend. I admit coming into it with a bias. My only other large, outdoor Christian event was Passion's OneDay event in 2000 which was a life altering, intense, dedicated time of worship, prayer and word. This was Christian entertainment and I found myself wishing that there was more depth to what I witnessed.

Granted, I only went for about five hours on Saturday afternoon and had to miss several of the artists that I would have probably resonated with and where the crowds were certainly larger and more engaged. I also was dragging like crazy and probably wasn't in the right frame of mind. We saw Desperation Band (which was okay), Angel Dean (who one of our guitar players plays for), Derek Webb (who was his usual prophetic, fabulous self) and heard from Craig Gross, founder of XXXchurch.com (which was excellent). Each set was only about 25-30 minutes in length, which made the five hours seem even longer. We'll see how compelling next year looks before determining whether we'll venture back or not.

The last two days have been spent at cold weather university for the store where we get to listen to industry reps from companies like The North Face, Mountain Hardware and Columbia talk about their products and technologies for hours on end. It's been good info and I've picked up a few cool things (swag) and great deals on some coats (which I desperately need). My last day is tomorrow before I finally get to go back to work at the store on Friday. It will be good to get back to a routine that resembles normal.